In a keynote address at the US National Association of Broadcasters convention in May 1961, Newton Minow, the then commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission described television as “a vast wasteland.”With its dominant fare of ditzy entertainment programme, TV was falling far short of its potential to inform and educate, he argued.
I don’t know how Minow characterises today’s dominant medium, the web. It is by no means a wasteland, given its vast treasure of information. However, that treasure chest shares space with a vast toxic terrain.
The toxicity came into particular focus recently when Leslie Jones, a U.S. television and movie star, went public with an emotional outcry about being savaged on Twitter and Facebook. Her re-Twits of the attacks make one wince, so there is no point reproducing them here. What are worth reproducing are her anguished reactions. From the early hours of the night of July 18 into the early hours of July 19, Jones vented her agony with a series of Twits that got increasingly anguished:
“Twitter I understand you got free speech I get it. But there has to be some guidelines when you let spread like that….”
“Profiles that some of these people are crazy sick. It’s not enough to freeze Acct. They should be reported.”
“I feel like I’m in a personal hell. I didn’t do anything to deserve this. It’s just too much. It shouldn’t be like this. So hurt right now.”
“I leave Twitter tonight with tears and a very sad heart. All this cause I did a movie. You can hate the movie but the shit I got today…wrong.”
As TV and movie stars go, Jones is unusual. She became an “overnight” success though she wouldn’t measure high on any beauty meter, let alone Hollywood’s. But she seems to have long come to terms with it, even playing to that reality in her comedic routines.
In “Saturday Night Live,” the programme that launched her fame, she sports a jaggedly spiked hairdo and portrays a tough, angry and ferocious black woman, often gnarling to accentuate the ferocity. And the character’s form of seduction is to growl menacingly at potential amours. “Do you want my number?” she would ask with a voice more threatening than seductive.
These have all played into the hands of people whose lives are so empty or troubled that they find gratification in mauling others in cyberspace.
In subsequent interviews, a less emotional Jones, has pressed the issue of finding ways to rein in the vitriol and character assassins.
“What is scary about the whole thing is that the insults didn’t hurt me. Unfortunately, I am used to the insults, that’s unfortunate,” she said on a TV programme. “What scares me is the injustice of a gang of people jumping against you for such a sick cause.”
On this, Jones missed the point somewhat. To describe the attacks as a cause is to give them undeserved status. They don’t constitute a cause any more than the attacks of rabid dogs. The psychology of cyber-assassins can’t possibly be different from that of terrorists. Their quest is not about a cause as such; it is about inflicting harm per se.
I have not seen and have no intention of seeing “Ghostbusters,” the movie that gave Jones’ attackers their pretext. I saw the original version in 1984 and thought it was just silly. I can’t imagine being entertained by a remake 32 years later, even with the novelty of an all-female cast. The promotional clips I have seen on television suggest that Jones’ role is not far from her TV characters. And the movie evidently has its critics. But, again criticism of a movie cannot possibly rise to the level of a cause, except in the twisted world of the web’s toxic terrain.
The web has the unique characteristic of being a medium in which laureates and loonies have equal access. And, sadly, the latter’s output has a better chance of going “viral,” a term that, in this respect, is fittingly derived from a sickening organism.
And in its provision of anonymity, the web is a sanctuary for cowards, the deep trench from which they lob their mud and vitriol. People who cannot stake a claim in person readily become cyber warriors. While others devote their time to cultivating, building and healing, they invest their energy in “shaming.”
Ironically, shaming has become more about images than reality. And those who used to be ashamed now do the shaming. Images have always been a powerful aspect of our reality. But never before have they been so easy, pervasive and distorting than in our digital age. Never before has it been so easy to obtain images, doctor them to a particular end and distribute them to a susceptible world.
The upturn of the social order has done much to warp our collective psyche. When extreme anomalies that would have been implausible as fiction are portrayed as normal, our perceptual angst is elevated. We begin to entertain as probable what we would have readily dismissed as absurd. Scholars of media ecology liken this phenomenon to the impact of ecological changes on animals, especially marine lives. Much like these creatures, when humans are thus transformed, we hardly notice.
When Jones went public with her anguish, those who have control over some social media — Twitter and Facebook in particular — took action. Some of the worst offenders’ accounts were suspended or blocked. But Jones has noted that her experience is not isolated, that there are millions of ordinary people out there who are similarly hounded by the rabid dogs, and they have no recourse. They too need protection, Jones said in an interview.
Jones, who restored her Twitter account a few days after cancelling it, can’t possibly believe that she herself is now on safe ground. One of her attackers whose Twitter account was blocked is Milo Yiannopoulos, a technology editor for Breitbart, a website for conservative views. His terse response to being blocked includes this ominous threat: “This is the beginning of the end for Twitter.”
No, he wasn’t threating to switch to armed terrorism. What he meant was that a competitor that is more welcoming to toxic content will emerge and users will throng there. And he may well be right.
Bob Marley didn’t live long enough to know about cyber-assassins. Yet he might as well have been referring to them when he sang: “Ain’t no use, no one can stop them now.” Except, perhaps, they get weary of their inanity or their thronging patrons find more meaningful ways to spend their time.
Alas, neither is probable.
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